The “For the Sake of Argument” Argument

Posted on June 16, 2004 in Morals & Ethics Reading

You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.

  — Italo Calvino

Note: I do not consider this article to be political but philosophical. The impact of Leo Strauss’s ideas afflict not only our politics but our science and moral culture.

You’ve undoubtably run into this: you publish something on your blog which is either critical of the claim that there were WMDs in Iraq or supportive of the theory of Evolution or factually describes the effects of Global Climate Change. Clear advances in our knowledge have been made in defining all three phenomenon. The evidence is overwhelmingly in your favor. Yet this person initiates a game of Sophistry: “For the sake of argument….” he begins. And by his words you know that you have run into a fan of eristic — arguing to win instead of arguing for the sake of wisdom.

In the June 2004 issue of Harper’s, Earl Shorris discusses the impact of Leo Strauss, one of the sires of the University of Chicago Great Books program and a notorious proponent of deliberate obfuscation and the creation of an elitist class where

“….the rule of the wise must be absolute rule. It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rules ought not to be responsible to the unwise subjects.”

Those are Leo Strauss’s own words and they are flawed because they assume one in possession of one kind of intelligence is fit to make declarations on anything at any time. It’s the logic of engineers who want to build bombs that kill more effectively without having to listen to the protests of outsiders who wonder if we should be dedicating resources to this end at all. It’s Randenoid logic which eschews the advantages of pluralist utilitarianism and replaces it with Nietzschean superman ethics. To survive in a consciously democratic world, it must not speak openly about itself. Straussian discourse must continually engage us in argument about things already proved so that the interests of its self-chosen elite will not be threatened.

Strauss knew that his work would not be popular in American society, so he deliberately resorted to bad writing:

Bad writing, unintelligible, contradictory writing, and systematic lying raises a moral question, as Strauss well knew. He ascribed his advocacy of bad writing, which he called ‘esoteric writing’, to the possibility that a writer could be persecuted for what he said. If the writer lives in danger of death or imprisonment because of speaking his ideas clearly, to write as if in a code addressed to a small coterie of followers is not unreasonable….Strauss claimed that clarity in a philosopher’s work endangered both the philosopher and the world. Perhaps. Although he was born in Germany, Leo Strauss wrote all but one of his books in England and the United States and he was not a homosexual, a Communist, or a person of color. Who would drag him out of his bed in the middle of the night to accuse him of adoring Plato or snuggling up to Aristotle? Who would put his small body on the rack to force a confession for the crime of promoting bad writing? Philosophers are not endangered in America, but if by philosophers we mean Straussians, especially those in government, the world may very well be in danger from philosophers.

Not so many years ago, I.F. Stone observed in his The Trial of Socrates that the beloved gadfly of Athenian democracy was far from the gentle soul he pretended to be, that he ardently promoted undermining Athenian democracy and replacing it with an oligarchy. His students sold out to the Spartans after his death. Like Strauss, Socrates never made his stands clear, but kept his opponents on the defensive with constant questions and swamping debate on trivial points.

Few criticisms of Socrates survived the purges of the Middle Ages. We have a play by Aristophanes and Plato’s accounts to go by. We know that his wife became angry enough to pee on his head, but nowhere in Plato’s admiring writings do we hear her side of the story. We see only the action — which is disgusting by any account — but no explication of the series of incidents which drove her to do it.

Plato’s accounts of Xanthippe’s rage bear a striking resemblance to contemporary accounts of the war in Iraq. A few weeks ago, Americans were angered by attacks on “security specialists” (meaning mercenaries) by the Iraqi people. The media told us the gory details, called the men who died “civilians”, and did a fine job of covering up aspects of the story which might have helped us understand just why the Iraqis were so angry. Instead we received more of the same old “fanatical Muslim” talk and insinuations that Al Qaeda had infiltrated the country when, in reality, the Iraqi resistance continues to refuse the support of Osama Bin Laden. (see the same issue of Harper’s for an excellent article about a Canadian reporter’s experiences inside the Iraqi resistance). We can easilly liken the caricature of Iraqi rage to Plato’s depiction of Xanthippe as the media moans about poor America when the real anger isn’t directed towards our people, but towards those who insist that this war must be waged. Iraqis want their freedom and the legacy of their land, not occupation. They have opened their flies for a reason and though we pretend to sit quietly through all this, we’re doing our best to tighten our grip on the Iraqi economy and impose a Western style facade of democracy on an unwilling people.

It is at this point that we can expect the denials to flow in. And the thing that will become apparent is that despite all the rhetoric about freedom, the promoters of the war aren’t very interested in what is actually happening on the ground but in winning the argument. A few months ago, I wrote of an encounter I had with a Bush supporter who tried to justify the war by saying that even though we hadn’t found WMDs we could never prove that they weren’t there. This kind of reasoning is calculated to fight facts with confusions and the bottom line is that Americans and Iraqis are dying. This is the game of Leo Strauss and the object is not to help us make the right decision for both American and Iraq, but to avoid having to say that a mistake — a BIG mistake — was made and that lies were told.

Those who employ Strauss’s methods resort to all kinds of ploys. In the course of this war, I have seen torture at Abu Ghraib blamed on women and on homosexuals. I have seen a miniscule and degraded amount of Sarin from a weapons dump known to exist by UN Inspectors turned into an arsenal. Who knows what tomorrow shall bring except more of the same? As I write this, Creationists have managed to wriggle their propaganda into bookstores in National Parks on the grounds that their ideas reflect an “alternative science”. Major oil companies gear up to try to explain away the melting of the polar ice caps. And the war continues to be waged in Iraq though now we call it by another name entirely. All these share a single concern: they want their idea to win over the facts. So they bring us argument after argument, never allowing the debate to rest, claiming victory when those dedicated to acting based on the truth pause to take a breath.

“But what is truth?” you might object. Ah, my friend, that comment shows how deeply Strauss’s methods have led you astray from the real question which is “What are the facts and how do they affect us?” You’ve bought into the Noble Lie which employs shadows in a cave to keep you from taking a hard look at the actors working behind your back.

The key is to keep you unable to see what is being done. As Shorris notes:

Arrogance follows elitism. It leads to cruelty, the capability, perhaps even the desire, to use people, to make them into things. No follower of Strauss can agree with Kant’s description of human dignity: man is not a means but an end in himself….the legacy of Strauss fits better with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche*….History belongs, Nietzsche wrote, to “the man who fights one great battle,” the man who looks to the past only in order to find exemplars, other great figures who attempted to shape the clay of humanity for a ‘higher purpose.’ History is filled with such figures, and with nations that to their sorrow put their faith in them. Most of us will not affect history in the role of great men, but in a society administered by men with Nietzschean dreams of power, our task is clear: We must resist.

Do this by ignoring the diversions and proceeding to change the world for the betterment of the commons.

*Strauss claimed to dislike Nietzsche, but curiously uses the word “public” again and again in his criticisms. The problem seems to have been not that Nietzsche held Straussian ideas of world dominance, but that he was too damn open about it.